ne another as the positive and negative
poles of human existence. In other words, I protest against the notion,
that the study of the practical everyday problems of human life is
without what we are pleased to call a culture value,--that in the proper
study of those problems one is not able to see the operation of
fundamental and eternal principles.

I shall readily agree that there is always a grave danger that the
trivial and temporary objects of everyday life may be viewed and studied
without reference to these fundamental principles. But this danger is
certainly no greater than that the permanent and eternal truths be
studied without reference to the actual, concrete, workaday world in
which we live. I have seen exercises in manual training that had for
their purpose the perfection of the pupil in some little art of joinery
for which he would, in all probability, have not the slightest use in
his later life. But even if he should find use for it, the process was
not being taught in the proper way. He was being made conscious only of
the little trivial thing, and no part of his instruction was directed
toward the much more important, fundamental lesson,--the lesson, namely,
that "a little thing may be perfect, but that perfection itself is not a
little thing."

I say that I have witnessed such an exercise in the very practical field
of manual training. I may add that I went through several such exercises
myself, and emerged with a disgust that always recurs to me when I am
told that every boy will respond to the stimulus of the hammer and the
jack plane. But I should hasten to add that I have also seen what we
call the humanities so taught that the pupil has emerged from them with
a supreme contempt for the life of labor and a feeling of disgust at the
petty and trivial problems of human life which every one must face. I
have seen art and literature so taught as to leave their students not
with the high purpose to mold their lives in accordance with the high
ideals that art and literature represent, not the firm resolution to do
what they could to relieve the ugliness of the world where they found
it ugly, or to do what they could to ennoble life when they found it
vile; but rather with an attitude of calm superiority, as if they were
in some way privileged to the delights of aesthetic enjoyment, leaving
the baser born to do the world's drudgery.

I have seen the principles of agriculture so taught as to leave with